Good things come in small package at ‘Nutcracker’Mateo’s version lacks a lavish stage set and live orchestra, but his crisp, clean choreography more than compensates, and Cambridge’s intimate Sanctuary Theatre proves an ideal venue.

Mateo’s company offers polished, intimate ‘Nutcracker’For 18 years, Jose Mateo’s Ballet Theatre has offered local audiences a polished, small-scale version of “The Nutcracker” that favors substantive dancing and a sweet, touching directness. Mateo’s 20-year-old troupe, the second-largest ballet company in Boston, makes no attempt to compete with Boston Ballet’s opulence and visual spectacle. The charm of this spare but beautifully costumed production is in the intimacy and details most patrons would miss in a grander, more spacious setting.

Life is a duet for ‘Urban Nutcracker’ performersFor years they danced in Boston Ballet’s “The Nutcracker.” But this month you won’t see Adriana Suarez and Gianni Di Marco at the Opera House. Instead, you can catch them just a few miles away, at the Strand Theatre in Dorchester in two performances of BalletRox’s “Urban Nutcracker.”

‘Urban Nutcracker’ rates as (holiday) fairDespite a power failure that left little Clarice abandoned at the holiday tree yesterday afternoon, BalletRox’s “Urban Nutcracker” concluded finally at the Strand Theatre, but with very mixed results.

BalletRox gives ‘Nutcracker’ a vibrant twistThis is a “Nutcracker” with attitude. Anthony Williams’s “Urban Nutcracker” is set not in Victorian England but in a present-day inner city, where holiday shoppers cross paths with busking drummers, doo-wop singers, and dancing gangs in a friendly face-off between tap and hip-hop. Instead of opening with genteel pirouettes by velvet-clad children, “Urban Nutcracker” kicks off with local step team A Chosen Few and its dynamic, high-kicking slap dance, and B-Boy Liem Nguyen, who whirls into a series of dazzling acrobatic flips and head spins.

Dancers twirl out holiday originalOne would expect Dance Complex, where so much excellent teaching happens, to come up with a better “Nutcracker” alternative than it did last night. “12 Dancers Dancing A Christmas in Cambridge” was mostly a forum for amateurs and young students, though there were at least a few accomplished artists in the mix.

Christmas packagesNutcrackers and other holiday treatsWhat to give for Christmas is a problem performing companies can solve by establishing their own holiday show. Unwrapped annually, tweaked and tidied, taken in here and poufed out there, it becomes a reliable way to celebrate. Sometimes it even grows into a tradition — famously The Nutcracker. Some of us cringe at the very word Nutcracker, but two things about that venerable institution struck me this year.

HOTLINE: Another ‘Nutcracker’ - but with a Bang-up twistDavid Parker & the Bang Group are bringing their unique and wacky sendup of the classic Christmas ballet “The Nutcracker” to Concord Academy for one performance only this Thursday at 7 p.m.

The Christmas season careered to a finish January 5 at Concord Academy with yet another Nutcracker, sort of, the first complete Boston performance of David Parker’s Nut/Cracked. Parker and the Bang Group showed sections of the work-in-progress two years ago at Summer Stages, and it’s now evolved into an hour-long extravaganza of dance diversions and visual one-liners with a distant relationship to the perennial ballet.

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